


The Angle of His Smile

by Tseecka



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: M/M, Vulcan Kisses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 05:56:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19223002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tseecka/pseuds/Tseecka
Summary: Spock’s smiles are hard to see—unless you know what you’re looking for.





	The Angle of His Smile

**Author's Note:**

> Commissioned by my dearest friend, Kass, who requested 300+ words of “Tender Spirk”.
> 
> I was aiming for TOS Spirk here, but you could absolutely read it as either!

He lives, he thinks, for those little smiles. He doesn’t think anyone else would recognize them as such—the muscles in his cheek are still and stiff as iron, the faint creases about his eyes neither deepen nor disappear, his lips remain a thin, hard line—but for Jim, it’s as bright and blinding as the sun. It’s the way the green rises, not in his cheeks, but into the tips of his pointed ears. It’s the way his head tilts—that precise angle, a degree less than irritation, a few degrees more than bemusement—and how it rustles the hairs at the top of his head. It’s the speed with which his eyelids lower and rise again and the way the dark irises behind them don’t move by even a tic, locked on to something that lives behind Jim’s own gaze, past his ego and his self-consciousness, somewhere deep down inside of his soul where only Spock has ever seen. 

He blinks up at the Vulcan from the biobed, his eyes squinting a little to resolve Spock’s form, bring him into focus and out of all the blurred-together shapes of sickbay. His head aches; something whirs, nearby, an anachronistic sound that means Bones is experimenting again; the fingers of his left hand are tacky, and his chest is bare where the uniform shirt has been cut away. There’s something sharp and annoying on the left side of his chest, and deeper down, an uncomfortable warmth where the dermal regenerator is working away at what feels like the mother of all phaser burns. And deeper than that, another warmth; but this one floods his senses like sinking into a warm bath, like sitting on mown grass under a pleasant yellow star, like tea or coffee that’s just the perfect temperature to gulp and gulp and gulp until it suffuses your veins with the last empty threats of it’s boiling heat. 

His eyes scan over the plane of Spock’s shoulder, follow it to the juncture of his neck, already calculating the angles. He doesn’t need to; he feels that secret, obvious smile in the thrum of a heartbeat, barely discernible where it beats in counterpoint to his under the tips of his own fingers. (Spock’s clever, subtle kiss is as demonstrative as if he had prostrated himself across Jim’s body—the relief, the reprimand, are both evident in his gentle touch.) 

But he likes to calculate the angle of Spock’s smile. He lives for it. When he’s ducking for cover from weapons fire, when he’s grappling some strange alien beastie, when a hostile, beautiful universe is doing it’s best to bring Jim Kirk down—he lives for it.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me under the same name on Tumblr!


End file.
